What caused the French Revolution?

By the late 1780s the French crown was spending far more on debt service than it could raise in tax, largely from a century of wars including support for the American colonies. Attempts at fiscal reform were blocked by the parlements and the privileged orders. In May 1789 Louis XVI convened the Estates-General at Versailles for the first time since 1614. In June the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and swore the Tennis Court Oath. On 14 July a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress prison that held only a handful of inmates but symbolised arbitrary royal power. In August the Assembly abolished feudal privileges and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

No single cause explains it. Fiscal collapse supplied the trigger, but grain prices had spiked after the disastrous 1788 harvest, so bread absorbed most of a labourer's wage just as the political crisis peaked. Underneath sat a structural problem: a society legally divided into three orders, in which the clergy and nobility held exemptions that a commercially confident middle class no longer accepted as natural. Enlightenment argument gave that resentment a vocabulary of rights and sovereignty. Add a monarch who alternated between concession and resistance, and a capital dense enough to organise quickly, and the ingredients combine. Historians argue about weighting, not about the fact that several causes had to coincide.

The Revolution's vocabulary is now the ordinary language of politics: citizen rather than subject, constitution, and left and right, which come from seating in the Assembly. The Declaration of the Rights of Man sits behind later human rights instruments, and the metric system and the Napoleonic legal codes spread across Europe and beyond. It also supplied the template for the modern worry that revolutions consume themselves, since the Terror of 1793 to 1794 followed the rights declaration by only four years. Governments still watch bread and fuel prices as political indicators, and the pattern of fiscal stress plus food inflation plus a closed political system remains a recognisable warning sign.

Common misconceptions abound. The myth is that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake" during the bread shortage; in reality the line predates her arrival in France and was attached to her only later, with no contemporary evidence. The myth is that the Bastille was stormed to free hundreds of political prisoners; in reality it held seven, and the draw was its gunpowder and its symbolism. The myth is that the Revolution was one event under one government; in reality it ran through a constitutional monarchy, a republic, the Terror, and the Directory before Napoleon took power in 1799. The myth is that taxes alone caused it; in reality tax, hunger, and legal inequality worked together.